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[–] waucka 0 points 1 point (+1|-0) ago 

Goddard was playing with liquid fuel before the war. Unlike von Braun, he got no traction with the US military. He also fell victim to the inverted-pendulum trap. Intuitively, it seems that a rocket should be more stable with the engines at the top, but that's not actually true. Von Braun's designs correctly put the engines at the bottom. That makes it a lot easier to put in a warhead, since you no longer need to have fuel and oxidizer pipes going around it.

There was also a lot of work that went into getting the rocket to survive atmospheric reentry, which took some trial and error. The flight path of a V2 is much, much different than the flight path of the kind of rockets they were firing from aircraft, it's much faster, and part of it is outside of the atmosphere, so it's easy to end up re-entering with the wrong orientation and break up due to aerodynamic forces.